Re: Constitutional Challenge to (C) Code

On Mon, 30 Mar 1998 Amy Stoller <redherring[_at_]tuna.net> wrote:
>
> If you have produced any intellectual property, your heirs will have
> control over its disposition and will be able to benefit from it for
> seventy years after you die. Lifetime plus seventy years is by
> definition a limited time. The extension from fifty to seventy years
> brings the US in line with the rest of the signatories to Berne and
> gives artists a chance to leave something to their children with a
> reasonable hope that those children may benefit thereby. It is a
> sensible provision, given increased life expectancy. I hope it is not
> your position that creators and owners of intellectual property should
> be unable to leave anything of value to their spouses and children, or
> that their heirs should have to endure without remedy uses of their
> spouses or parents' life work which are repugnant to them.

Amy Stoller's screen name is well chosen. It is true that increasing the term from life-plus-fifty to life-plus-seventy conforms US law to some foreign copyright terms, but otherwise there is little reality behind her comments.

For one thing, the proprietors of intellectual property of any value are seldom the creators; they have long ago handed over rights in exchange for fixed payments that are of no benefit whatever to descendants of the creators. Even if they were, the discounted present value of any revenue stream from fifty to seventy years following someone's death is asymptotic to zero, meaning that any such payments have no incentive value to the creator (who is whom the copyright laws are supposed to reward, not non-creators).

For another thing, there is no relationship at all between the term increase and increases in life expectancy, which is automatically accounted for in the "life" part of "life plus."

What the term extension represents is simply a wealth transfer from the public to the IP middle-people, the publishers, broadcasters, moviemakers and the like, with only the fig leaf of hypothetical benefit to creators to cover the blatancy of it all.

• Vance R. Koven * phone: 617-482-3852 *
• attorney at law * fax: 617-482-4972 *
• 20 Park Plaza Ste. 520 * net: vrkoven[_at_]world.std.com *
• Boston, MA 02116 * *

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